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| Thursday, November 4, 2004 11:22 AM |
| Stages of Grief and Loss |
 by Fëanor |
I thought I was already over the whole thing last night. I was feeling a lot better. I was talking to poppy about stages of grief and loss, and I was saying how I'd gotten through the anger and the denial, and I was feeling really kind of okay. She warned me that it wasn't over yet, and I'd be feeling depressed again soon enough.
And, as usual, she was right. This morning I looked at W's smirking face on the front page, and then opened up the paper and read a run-down of the problems created by his administration, which he might want to try fixing in his new term (like the first net job loss since the Depression; the quagmire in Iraq; social security; the huge deficit), and I was once again filled with rage and hate and disbelief. How? Why? What was half the nation thinking voting for this clown? He totally fucked up, and you re-elected him. You want more of this? What is wrong with you??
I talked to my Dad on the phone this morning, and he said he'd been struggling with some of the same questions, and had come to the conclusion that most people voted with their fear. They're afraid of terrorist attacks, and they think Bush can protect them, because there were no terrorist attacks on American soil post-9/11, during Bush's administration.
But that's just the old tiger/rock argument from the Simpsons. Lisa is trying to explain some specious logic to Homer, and tells him that she has a rock that keeps tigers away. "You don't see any tigers around here, do you?" Therefore, this rock obviously keeps them away. Of course, Homer totally doesn't get her point and asks if he can buy the rock.
And this is our country. A bunch of Homer Simpsons.
Or maybe they voted on the "issues." Like, their hatred of gay people.
So half the people in America are stupid, ignorant, or bigoted, or some combination of all three.
I want to hide from these people.
But maybe I'm wrong. I definitely want to be wrong. So if anybody voted for George W. Bush yesterday, or knows someone who did, I would really like to know the reasons. Seriously. I want to understand this. Post a comment below or email me.
In related news, last night at movie night we watched Tod Browning's Freaks, courtesy the lovely Sarcasmo. I'd heard a lot about Freaks and had tried to watch it before a year or so ago. But when I made that attempt it was really late, and the movie was really poorly acted (the stars are real sideshow circus performers, most with no acting experience whatsoever), with such a transparent moral to it, and the performers had such thick accents and shrill voices, that I gave up on it about halfway through. And the movie is only an hour long!
But anyway, I stuck with it this time. And the acting was still generally quite bad, the dialogue hard to understand (we finally turned the subtitles on), and the message painfully obvious, but there's also a really, really fantastic scene at the end (the climax of the film, in which the freaks come crawling menacingly through the rain and mud to add a new member to their ranks) that has some great action, amazing photography, clever dialogue, decent acting, and is just all-around creepy and effective. It's worth watching the rest of the movie to get to this scene.
After the movie, we watched most of a documentary (included on the DVD) about the film and its cast, which was unfortunately lacking in insight. They only interviewed three or four people for the thing, and one or two of those guys were pretty patronizing and nasty about the "people of difference," which was pretty disappointing, given the message of the film (that being, "Freaks are people, too"). To be fair, the documentary did convey some interesting information about freaks in general, and about some of the specific preformers in the film. And it also made us aware of the original ending of the film, which sounded much darker and cooler than the one that's actually in the movie. Unfortunately, the footage of this ending apparently no longer exists, since they didn't show it to us. Instead, they showed us three or four endings that were only slightly different than the current ending.
Anyway, I'll keep working through those stages of grief. Later on today the Episode III teaser trailer should be available to watch on StarWars.com (for Hyperspace members only, of course), and then we've got game night tonight, and this weekend poppy and I are hosting a WTF party where all us anti-Bushies can hole up together, eat bad food, and console each other. All of this should help me a lot.
And if it doesn't, I'll just buy a bunch of stuff for myself. Consumption is always good. |
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